This is really morbid.
But do you have any postpartum plans? And do they involve golf courses?
Um,
well, technically, it's illegal to spread your ashes just wherever you want to.
Yeah. What are they gonna do?
Yeah,
but I may have a few golf courses that I've worked on that, that
a superintendent will, will get a small amount of that
because,
you know,
I've left myself in some of these places
that seems fitting to me.
Tom do does not have a selling bone in his body, which is why he's so interesting and in
his own way, uh entertaining, but it's also part of the genius uh of, of his artwork,
but he fulfills everything we're trying to do in this series.
He's a true original in how he thinks about golf courses, how he builds golf courses,
how his whole long career has, uh unfolded.
So we're delighted to have Tom Doak as
our, our second episode here at golf originals.
We went to see him at this golf course outside of Hope Sound that he's building.
It's called Sandglass.
It's a really interesting site on the Saint Lucie Canal
and we're gonna try to go deep with Tom Doak.
I don't even know why I'm saying the word trying
because Tom Doak is not capable of not going deep.
That's what he does.
We saw Tom Doak in his element and if you're interested in golf course architecture,
you're gonna dig seeing this whole thing.
You got, you got your own rover now.
Well, you've got a big time,
Tom, we've known each other over 30 years now.
You know,
and I saw your early love was for this thing and I'm
hearing it now and I've heard you at various intervals in between.
How do you, how would you describe what your love of the craft is
at this point in your career versus other points in your career?
Um
You know, to me there's two really special parts of this job.
One
that
was barely in play here is figuring out the routing and where the golf holes go.
But then the second part of it is like
the detailing stuff, building greens, building bunkers.
You know,
I work with a small crew of people that I've, that
I've worked with for 5 to 25 years.
Um
You know, it's, it's like my own little band. Nothing when we saw it indicates.
Oh, this is a golf course under construction.
But of course it was when we, we made a big U turn and got there.
And really, you're looking at an enormous heaving field of sand.
That's what you see. Right.
Now, this project is so different from most of the things I've done. This was just,
you know,
it was a dead flat piece of ground between that
road and that canal over there and there was like,
nothing on it.
You know, if I, if I'm on a piece of land like Pacific Dunes or kid kidnappers,
I'm judging myself on. Did I get the most out of that piece of ground?
And I never think about, well, what if I build a 20 ft hill over there to make it better?
You, you're not gonna do that with a beautiful natural piece of ground
here.
It's just the opposite. You could do anything
you could imagine. Tom Doe building a golf course with a donkey and a shovel.
But that is not what he's doing here. He actually had bird moving equipment.
He had those motorized carts that take you around.
So he's got a very interesting site, uh, where we are,
but that's sort of a starting point for Tom Duke.
He's not gonna take a site that doesn't
have promise and isn't interesting and doesn't quote,
speak to him.
It was almost a good thing from my, from my point of view that there really wasn't a,
you know, there, there wasn't a lot of vegetation here at all.
It was all kind of a clean slate
once you got into it did, or even at the start, did you have in a deal?
This could be, it's not gonna be like
Ely and it's not gonna be like rail,
it's not gonna be like whistling streets. But did you have something in mind? Like,
oh, I can take some inspiration from this.
I, you know,
I didn't think about it in terms of like a particular golf course so much as,
you know, golf holes that I love that. I, that are fairly adaptable to flattish land.
Like, you know, I've, I mean, I've had a file folder for 30 plus years of like,
yeah, if I've ever like, got
something blank to do, that would be a hole that you could build.
So
a ton of ideas, sort of like mcdonald, you know, he had his favorite holes in the UK.
Do you wanna show us around a little bit?
That would be neat.
You wouldn't hire Tom Doak if you're looking to
have a golf course development or the demand is,
oh, we must have a PJ championship.
That's not how he works.
But if you want an icon of classic original golf course, Tom Doak is your guy?
Some of these built three courses at Bandon Dunes. None is like the other.
They're all excellent
uh Cape Kidnappers in New Zealand is a legendary course
Stonewall, which he built in the early nineties,
which is where I first got to meet him is, is an excellent golf course.
This guy does unique work. He's not trying to build famous golf courses.
He's trying to build good ones that will last
when I look at a site for the first time I was, I'm always looking for like, OK,
what's the, what's the red flag here?
What is the problem that I'm never gonna be able to sort out a good answer to.
I mean,
any golf course architect at Tom's level very much thinks of the tract of land,
like an artist thinks
of the canvas. Now, what are you gonna do with it? But this was a canvas
that had no trees on it had really nothing on it but sand.
And then the question is, well, what are you gonna do with all the sand?
And Tom figured it out.
I was trying to figure out, ok,
if we're gonna do something in Florida and make it really different for Florida,
let's have a hole that plays up high to a landing area and back
down to the green and gives me a really good view of this canal
and you're standing in the middle of the fairway of it.
But my, you know, my, my thought model for, what kind of hole am I gonna build that?
Nobody would ever try to build in Florida was the 13th hole of Pine Valley.
And this is pretty close to that.
An artist takes his inspiration from anywhere and anything and makes it
his or her own.
And that's what Tom Duke's saying. When you're starting from scratch.
The idea that you're just gonna doodle a bunch of great
golf holes that you thought up out of thin air.
Nobody does that.
You know,
Charles Burr mcdonald had all his hall from overseas that he wanted to try to build.
Everybody's got ideas from something else because you have
nothing out here to give you an idea.
One of the interesting things about this golf course is
we do have that technology now and how do we,
how do we address that?
Where do we, you know, where do we, where do we go with it and where do we stop,
you know it on
Pacific Dunes or
on the golf course that I'm building in West Texas right now in a really nice site.
I would never think of trying to replicate the 11th hole at Saint Andrews
really close to the real thing
you've got plenty to work with.
But out here it's kind of like that's your starting point.
But if, if that's your starting point and you have really detailed information,
it could be your ending point too if you wanted it to be.
So,
it's an interesting conundrum of where you draw the line.
People get deep in the weeds on the rules and different aspects,
the engineering of golf clubs.
And of course, one of them is
golf course design,
golf club,
Alice
golf club.
You know,
there's a lot of people talking out of their ass about
golf course architecture there and they don't really understand anything about
why those decisions were made
when I'm actually out here working for a day,
the things that I'm looking at and making decisions
on are things that you never think about.
Like most people think. Well, he must be focused on.
How long is this hole from the back teeth?
I don't even know a lot of the time.
I know it's a short par four but whether it's 295 or 310,
I didn't think about that a lot.
You know, I'm thinking about like,
what, what can I see? And what can I not see when I'm playing the hole?
And should the green be 2 ft higher or 2 ft lower?
And that's the kind of thing that most people never think about that,
but that's what we're, we're working in three dimensions.
Most people doodle in two dimensions.
Who, who's, who's a living architect who you think is underrated?
But we're all overrated now,
we're all drastically overrated because there's so
much publicity for every new golf course,
you know,
and, and,
you know, Bill Kors is the same as me. It's just like, no,
we get way too much credit for what we do.
There's so many people out here who, who did something,
you know, if you like that green.
That's not really me. That's
that guy and the bulldozer over there did half of that. But you don't know him.
You just think I told him. Exactly. What to do.
So,
I don't know, it's, it's hard, you know,
the only underrated guys now are the young guys that are just,
just getting a chance to do the, do stuff on their own for the first time.
And I don't
a, you know, a
lot of them have worked for me and I don't,
it's unfair to
five other guys if I name one or two of them,
I've never come to a course construction site where
you actually had to look for a parking space.
Basically wanted to have a bunch of places where you could, you know,
if it's late in the day, you could play three holes, six holes, five holes,
nine holes, jump around if there's
a handful of other people on the golf course and play as
many holes as you want at the end of the day.
But because the whole thing is east and west,
you know, we, we wanted the clubhouse on the east end.
So you're not playing straight into the sun in the morning and you're
not playing straight into the sun at the end of the day.
So instead of the clubhouse being in the middle somewhere, it's on one end.
So that means you don't have returning knots.
If you had returning nines, it would just be
down and back and down and back would be the only way to do it. And that was,
you know, that's not what we're after
a lot of good golf courses don't have returning nines. No, they don't.
And you know, Mackenzie famously,
you know, it's, it's one of his 13 points of golf course architecture that
ideally, of course you'd have 22, set two returning nines.
And then he said in his later book toward the end of his career.
Yeah, I wish I'd never said that because,
because people always bring that up like you should always do it.
And you think about his best courses,
Cypress Point doesn't have returning nines most, you know, other than Augusta,
most of his famous courses don't
one of the really neat things about talking
to Tom Doak about his golf course philosophy is
he is not thinking about making the course hard for Scotty
Scheffler, John Ram.
He is thinking about the guy who's trying to break 90.
And part of the absolute genius of the man is that is exactly what Alaa
Mackenzie was doing as, as well. If you go deep with Tom Doak about this,
of Augusta National,
he will tell you the ultimate beauty of Augusta National like the old course before
is that it really was designed for a guy who would love to break 90.
It's a great golf course.
You know,
the last 50 years, they've been more interested in
being the home of the masters than being a great golf course for the members.
You know, Mackenzie tried for both, both is harder now.
And, you know, and they ought to do things for the tournament.
The thing that I've admired about playing different Tom do courses over the years
and seeing different Tom do courses over the years
is there is no cookie cutter Tom Doe.
Course none is like the other
Tom Doke is interested in the person who is playing his course on an everyday basis.
Where is Mackenzie and your Pantheon?
Oh, you know, right there at the top for me,
he used to be kind of my hero and my careers followed his a little bit, you know, I was,
I wanted to see all those courses in Australia
as soon as I could because of his influence over there.
And that's, you know, I wound up building golf courses in Australia and New Zealand,
partly because I went because I kept going downwards.
So my career has some parallels with his.
Yeah, if I had to hire somebody to build a course for me from any of those dead guys,
it would probably be mckenzie.
And just cause I think
he thought more about what golf was like for
the bottom 90% of golfers.
A, a normal person, which Tom Doak is not,
is always aware of coming across as being immodest. Tom Doke doesn't really care.
I mean,
that's one of his superpowers and you might say that's one of his social challenges.
So when people compare him to what many people would say
is the greatest golf course architect of of all time.
Alison Mackenzie
just as a starting point. Cypress point and Augusta National.
Um,
Tom's very comfortable with that. Yeah, you can talk about win.
Alister Mackenzie in the same breath,
whether any of his courses will ever be
as celebrated as Augusta National and Cypress Point.
You know, we'll have to come back in 100 years and find out,
uh, but it's telling about Tom
that, uh, he's not
looking for the comparison, but he's not afraid of the comparison either.
Who, who's a,
who's a dead golf course architect that you think is really underrated.
I mean, a really good answer is William Flint. I'm speaking to the choir here.
You're both from Philadelphia, but
I mean, I was a great architect, build a bunch of stuff, but he, you know,
he was never the most famous golf course architect of the day.
So people now don't know Perry Maxwell, who,
you know, who built two or three of Mackenzie's most famous golf courses. And then,
you know, after Mackenzie was done,
Maxwell went and did some great stuff on his own too,
but
not in quantity because a lot of his career was
like at during and after the depression instead of before,
there's been a new movement in golf, of really good golfers coming,
prominent golf course architects.
Tom doesn't represent that.
Tom comes out of the same tradition as Alistair
Mackenzie of a guy who would love to try
to break 90 if he's playing well and this is the course that I'm going to play.
If you start with that as your starting point,
you're going to have a golf course that is much more appealing to a great,
many more people.
Most guys who get into golf course, architecture are good players because
when you're trying to decide if you like a golf course,
the guy who's the best player is the one everybody turns to, to see his opinion.
So that's how they wind up in architecture.
And there's, you know, there's, there's fewer architects like me
that weren't the best player in the group.
Um
There's more now than there ever have been,
you know,
partly because Jill and I have proved you don't have to
be that guy in order to be a really good architect,
you couldn't have two people more different than Jack Nicholas and Tom Doak,
except that
they're both iconoclastic, powerful people
all these years later.
How do you look at the experience of working with Nicholas at Saban?
Uh
Well, you know, I knew when we were doing it.
It's like, well, this is a one off kind of opportunity to do this.
And, you know, I mean, I grew up idolizing Jack Nicklaus as a golfer.
So
it was a really interesting experience for me. It was really
tough situation to like
cosign with somebody who's used to making the final call.
And, you know, and the same for me, he was, he understood that.
But
like I said out there before,
the hardest part of that was not he and I
actually got along better than I thought we would.
The hard part would go because we both agreed at the beginning. Ok,
we're taking one step back here.
And even though usually once I say it's good, it's good.
Now you gotta be on the same page or we're still working on it,
but we agreed to do that.
So that was fine.
The thing I didn't think of until way too late
was that
we were simultaneously agreeing that everybody who works
for us was taken two or three steps back
and that didn't work very well.
The guys that worked for him were like, who's, who's that kid telling Jack what,
what he thinks?
And,
and you know, my shapers are like
this green is cool. Why doesn't he want, why is he making me blow it up and do it again?
So
that was hard.
They both said when it was over,
Tom Duke said it was a neat experience working with Big Jack.
Big Jack said it was a neat experience working Tom Duke
and they both were basically saying to their inner circle. Never again.
Did you learn something working with Jack that you've
applied to your career since then?
A lot of little tidbit type things and just,
you know, but, but,
you know, at the end of the day,
the ma the main thing I learned was I do not wanna get that busy.
That, that is crazy to try to do as much as he's doing
and 11 or two points of the way he was, you know, pep talking to us.
I don't understand why you guys aren't busier
and, and,
and we're looking at him like we don't understand why you wanna be as busy as you are.
Mhm.
You know, the weird thing about Jack and I never said it to him this way,
as a golfer,
the thing I admired about him most
was that
four major championships a year were much
more important to him than everything else.
You know, like he won a lot of PGA tour events,
but I don't think he really cared about exactly how many
PGA tour events he won at the end of the day.
It was more about those majors
and that's how I've treated my architecture career.
You know,
every time I get a chance to do a great
golf course that's like playing in a major championship.
And I want to
do the best I can in that.
And I don't want to be trying to do 10 other projects.
At the same time,
I really wanna be focused on these one or two great things we're doing.
Tom Duke was a smart kid who went to Cornell.
And unlike a lot of people go to Ivy League schools,
he knew he had to learn this profession from the ground up.
When,
when you got to Cornell was Trent Jones a significant figure already in your mind.
He was.
But the, you know, the, the person that kinda got me interested in golf course,
architecture in the first place was Pete Dye
Harbor Town was like the third golf course I ever saw when I was 10 years old.
And it was,
yeah, that, it just opened and it was, it was just
very high profile and, and,
you know, it was so different than
the other golf courses that I was seeing at that point in my life.
It was fascinating to me how different that was and why was it that way? And,
and why did everybody like it so much?
And then I did get to see,
you know, places like Pinehurst and Pebble Beach when I was a kid too.
So I, you know, it's not just that I saw Pete's work but,
but,
you know, when I started, like, really pursuing this as a career,
anyone you asked in the golf business in 1980
was like,
go work for P I,
um,
uh,
you know, any person in any phase golf pros,
you know,
you know, uh, Dean,
Dean, you know.
Oh, yeah, we're working with Pete on a, on a project for the tour right now.
Everyone said go work for him because
he's really involved building the golf course and you should learn that part too.
And you know, for hands-on experience, nothing could be working for,
be dying in construction.
And he was literally had a shovel in hand,
was sitting on a bulldozer and learned the business from the ground up.
He didn't have some high pollutant sense of, oh, I'm ready to do this,
that or the other thing
he knew he had to learn the business from the dirt level.
The hardest halls, a lot of the time is playing downwind.
Like how, you know, how do you stop the ball where you want it to stop?
And
how do you make sure?
You know,
and is there a place you can land the ball in the front of
the green to get it on the green and that kind of stuff?
So the cool thing about this hole to me was like, ok,
we're building a hole into this little corner just before
it drops off and it's not a very long hole,
but it's downwind and the ball is not gonna stop real easy.
So it's gonna be a little scary when it's windy to play a
shot and land it in the middle of the screen for fear.
It's coming down here.
And so,
so all we've got is that little ridge in front, in the middle of the green
that like,
you know, if the pins back here,
are you gonna try to pitch it over that and worry about it running through?
Are you going to try to land it in a little hollow that in between.
Are you confident enough? You can make it stop if you hit it here or
do you wanna land it in that little neck and just bounce
it into this part of the green and go from there?
But I think this hole more than anything else
will play like a Scottish hole because it's all about
where do I land the ball to get it to stop where I need it to stop.
So at the end of a work day, like when you've got your boots all muddy like that,
what do you do to clean them up?
Go beat, go beat them against the pavement somewhere.
Eventually,
you know,
I just stepped in the wrong place trying to avoid a truck today.
Two days from now, they'll be cleaner when I'm, when I'm headed out of here. Uh,
that'll wear back off.
You're, is the life of an architect a little bit like the,
uh the life of a working actor where
you're away from home so long,
so often for such long periods that it's hard to maintain
a personal life while you're,
uh,
so you professionally, as my ex-wife said, and as my current wife has said,
more than once, you're always either coming or going.
It's not like an a being an actor or a soldier where you're away
for six months or a year and then you're home for a while and then
waiting for the next big project.
So I'm here for five or six days at a time
and then maybe I'll go to one of my other projects before I go home. So I don't
spend as much time traveling back and forth in between. To me that's wasted time.
Um,
but,
you know,
I'll leave here and then I'll have to be back here in a month, 4 to 6 weeks again
to see how the next batch of holes is coming along.
So your life is always kind of governed by
the construction schedules for the golf courses and it's,
you know, it's very hard to live with. So, you know, I'm divorced and remarried.
Fortunately, my, my wife compares me to being a single mom
and I'm better than being a single mom.
And now our kids are grown and gone and, you know,
we're playing with grandchildren now, that's a whole different world.
But certainly,
you know, raising a family when you're away, 100 and 50 days a year is hard.
You
and your wife, there would be really good at it.
My wife and I have talked about golf is like one
of the few places in the world that men are,
are in a safe space to be emotional
and get really upset or get really excited or whatever.
You know, most of your life, you don't, you know, people, you know, if you, if,
if you let out a yell of joy
in a lot of settings people would be like, what the hell
on a golf course is perfectly normal.
So I think about that a lot when I'm out here is like, you know,
building the kind of things that gonna make people yell or
scream or, or just walk up over the hill and see that view and go, wow,
that's beautiful.
And I've gotten to work on that kind of sites where you get that a lot.
And we def, I definitely do think about that as part of design
is like,
you know,
getting you into places where you feel something
instead of just I'm out here trying to break you.
And I don't think a lot of other golf course circuits,
think about it that much.
Um
But is it such a calling that there was really
no other choice for you but to pursue this.
So I got an invitation, my high school reunion.
You know, people I, I, that I hadn't seen for 20 years, but like
everyone there
was like,
you're the only one here who's getting to do exactly what
he wanted to do when he was 15 years old.
And
yeah, I've wanted to do this
as far back as I can remember.
And it's a thrill to be able to do it. And I feel really blessed that,
that I've been able to do that. And I know that's pretty rare.
Who knows what else Tom Duke would do? He's doing the thing he was meant to do.
He's doing the thing that he loved to do
when I'm out on a new piece of ground in a beautiful piece of ground and
trying to figure out the puzzle of where the golf holes go.
That's as much fun as I can have. And that hasn't gone away at all.
Um,
you know,
and the same when I'm out here working with
my crew trying to build a green or something,
it's just, it's just a lot of fun and
you get a real creative
thrill from it
and,
and that doesn't go away. And it's not like, you know,
I've built a lot of golf courses but, you know,
I've been doing this for like 35 years and I've only
built about 45 or 50 golf courses on my own.
So it's not really,
it's, it's not really like I'm sick of it.
You know, it's still like every project is special cause you don't really do that.
Many of them
golf does have a knack
of certain people are drawn to it at a very young age.
And for whatever reason, personality defect or not,
it fulfills almost everything that they want out of life.
And Tom Doke is such a person, whether you like his work or not,
no one can say that it doesn't come from a pure place. It does